Preamble Time to act

Combined road/rail transport (CT), i.e. the combination of a pre-carriage and/or onward carriage by road and a main carriage by rail, is the rail segment in freight transport with by far the highest growth potential. CT therefore plays a central role in generating additional traffic on the railways and thus contributing to CO2 reduction in the transport sector. Without the appropriate framework conditions for CT, the national and European modal split targets for rail will not be achievable.

From the point of view of the customers of freight transport, i.e. the clients of transport services in industrial companies, CT is the most flexible and innovative of all rail segments. In view of the continuing growth in the volume of goods, both nationally and globally, its environmental balance and the possible reduction in road congestion represent additional advantages that are rapidly gaining in importance. Of all the rail segments, CT will also find it easiest to be attractive in the future for those groups of goods and transport tasks for which rail has rarely been used to date.

However, CT is also more demanding and more complex than pure road or rail transport: each transshipment from one means of transport to another means additional effort and costs time and money. The same applies to the necessary empty container logistics, i.e. the provision and collection of the transport containers. Due to the large number of players involved - freight forwarders, haulage companies, terminal operators, CT operators and rail transport companies - the customer and communication chains are longer in CT and the transparency along the transport chain is often less high for the consignor and consignee in comparison. As a result, for the shipping industry as a customer, the conception, commissioning and management of CT transports are often even more time-consuming and knowledge-intensive. The basic challenges for CT also include in capacity bottlenecks in the rail network and at the terminals as well as in efficiency potentials that have yet to be leveraged and in a suboptimal and partly unclear European and national regulatory framework.

The goal of this paper is to identify the levers that reduce barriers to entry to CT, create effective incentives for customers and providers, and enable the transportation sector to increase the attractiveness and performance of CT for existing and potential new customers.